Our Lady of Sorrows

Standing at the foot of the Cross is our mother. She is standing, not crying or fainting; she is there supporting her son with her presence. Silent tears run down her cheeks. And Saint John is also there, the celibate apostle, the one Jesus loved. Other women are there too. Women are stronger than men. Many artists tried to capture this moment but with different results. It is almost impossible to represent in a painting what happened at Calvary. Where are the other apostles? Where are the big guys? They said they were going to die for him. They ran away from the cross. We too are still running away from the cross. When are we going to stop running away? Today is a good day.

We can ask Saint John to help us to be at the foot of the cross, not to be afraid of the cross. We ask him to grasp our hand tightly and help us to remain there at this critical moment in human history. We are between him and Mary, hiding our face in our mother’s robes. We don’t want to see what’s happening. We can only hear.

The passion of Jesus is the passion of Mary. It is impossible to know what is happening through Mary’s heart. We can only imagine. Spiritual sufferings are more acute than physical ones. Why do we bring to our consideration something that happened 20 centuries ago? Because it is still affecting us. In eternity everything is present. We are the cause of their suffering, mother and son, united in their sorrow. The more we look at what happened at Calvary, the more we will try to avoid our sins. The more we love Jesus and Mary, the more we will avoid what is offending them. Our sins affect the people we love, the same way our love for them empowers them.

Jesus says: “Woman, behold your son.” It is not a detached expression calling his mother “woman”. He is reminding us that when Adam saw Eve for the first time, he called her “woman”, bones of my bones. Eve was the first woman. Mary is the second woman. The first one let us down because of sin. The second one was the cause of our redemption, of our healing. The Fathers of the Church loved this parallelism between Eve and Mary. Jesus called first his mother “woman” at Cana; at the beginning. Now it is the end. Then he changed water into wine; now the wine is becoming blood, Eucharistic wine. She still remembers that moment. For Jesus has to die for us; for her, to become our mother. She gave birth to him at Bethlehem without pain; now we are born at Calvary in a bloody and painful manner. We have caused her so much blood, so much suffering. This is what we are considering today, Mater Dolorosa, Sorrowful Mother, to foster our love for her: how much pain we have delivered to her, for her to deliver us. The more we suffer, the more we love. We contemplate her sorrows for us to react, to change our lives, to have a deep conversion. We cannot remain indifferent in front of her sufferings, specially knowing that she is there because she wants to be there, the fruit of her love for her son and for us.

“Behold your mother.” Now Jesus talks to us. First he asks his mother to look after us. Some people say that he wasn’t planning to give us his mother, but when he saw from the cross our feebleness, he decided to give her to us. Now he asks us to look after her. He gave us his treasure, his masterpiece. We are represented by Saint John. Nothing is left for him but the wood of the cross.

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Parables of the lost sheep and the coin

Sinners were attracted to Jesus and the Pharisees complained. Sinners followed Jesus because they saw an opportunity to leave their sinful life behind. That’s why we too are attracted to Jesus. We need him; without him we are nothing. The more we see ourselves as sinners, the more we feel Jesus’ attraction. Like a magnet; the closer it is to the iron, the more difficult it is to separate the two. Our world has lost a sense of sin, the natural pull from God. Our society moves around itself without a gravitational force to keep it steady, like a moon without an earth, to keep it from being destroyed by the sun. The lack of God is like a black hole that sucks everything into a void.

This grumbling of the Pharisees, gave an opportunity for Jesus to give us these parables of God’s mercy. In this broken world of ours, the consideration of a Merciful God is very important. When John Paul II was asked what impressed him most about God, he answered: “His infinite mercy.” God said to Saint Catherine of Siena: “Mercy is my darling attribute, and to that end, and for the incomprehensible love I felt towards man, I sent the Word, my only Son; I illustrated this by the representation of a bridge reaching from heaven to earth, uniting the human and divine natures.”

If you could describe Pope Francis’ summary of his pontificate with one word it is “Mercy”. He declared in 2015 a Holy Year of Mercy. He wrote a book titled: “The name of God is mercy”. He says with boldness that “mercy is the first attribute of God.” He wants to remind the modern man living in a field hospital, surrounded by casualties, that “there are no situations we cannot get out of, we are not condemned to sink into quicksand. God does not want anyone to be lost. His mercy is infinitely greater than our sins.” Saint Therese found a weakness in God the Father: “He has one great infirmity. He is blind. And so ignorant of arithmetic that He cannot even add up.”

Jesus gives us two parables that are very similar. Both depict the same actions: loosing, searching, finding and rejoicing. This is our own story, constantly getting lost, God going out searching for us, finding us if we allow him to, bringing us back to him, rejoicing in our encounter with the angels and saints, and lifting us up to a higher level than before. Every time he finds us, instead of punishing us, he rewards us by bringing us a bit closer to himself. God uses our sins to lift us up, to enrich us, to cover our nakedness with his graces.

But both parables emphasise different aspects. In the lost sheep Jesus appears as a Good Shepherd, ready to place us on his shoulders. It is the earliest image we have of Jesus in the catacombs. It shows God’s love for us, ready to leave the other 99 in search of us. Jesus never gives up, always persistent in his search for us, and rejoicing when we come back. Give him the joy of finding you. It’s only if you don’t want to be found, that he won’t be able to bring you back to the flock. The parable of the lost coin shows that every soul is important, that we are unique in God’s eyes, because as in every coin there is normally the face of a ruler, we have the imprint of his image in our soul engraved at Baptism. Make sure you keep it bright and shining.

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Conditions for following Jesus

Today in the Gospel Jesus gets very serious. He looks at the people following him and he realises that many of them were there for human reasons. They were following him because they wanted to experience miracles, because they were fed with tasty bread and fish, because that man spoke very well, because he had a go at the Pharisees, or he defended the poor and he could become a political power. The same thing happens with us: we are here because we feel good, because it is the right thing to do or because of what others are going to say about us. Jesus uses a very strong expression to bring his message across: to love him we need to hate everything else. Some scriptural authors tried to soften the expression, but Jesus wanted to emphasise a point: we are either with him or against him.

What he says today is about him and about us. Other religions put across their main message in different ways. Most religious leaders, Buddha, Mohammad, or Luther, gave us some ideas to follow, some doctrine to upheld, but none of them commanded us to love them. Only Jesus demands a complete love for him. His claim is very strong, one that doesn’t allow half measures: unless you love me more than anything else, you cannot be my disciple. Either he is right or he is a mad man. Either he is the Son of God or he is a fool.

In the light of what he says we have to make a choice. If he is right, everything else takes to second place. And of course, he is right. We are created for him and we have experienced that it is in only following him that we are truly happy, that he is the only one who can fill all the desires of our souls. We know it in the depth of our hearts. To put him first, we need to acknowledge what is taking the place of Jesus in our lives. We need to be sincere. There are other things in our lives that don’t belong to Jesus and we should slowly, through a good examination of conscience, find out what they are and bring them to Jesus, or if necessary, get rid of them. We should react against what is holding us back, against what is not allowing us to become closer to him.

We have the example of the saints that managed to win their war against themselves. Saint Francis of Assisi was dependent on his father; he gave everything back to him, even his clothes, and was naked in front of everyone. Saint Thomas of Aquinas had to fight against his family who didn’t want him to become a Dominican; they locked him in a castle for a year and he had to escape. Saint Catherine of Siena didn’t want to marry the husband her mother had prepared for her; she cut her beautiful hair off and the husband to be didn’t want to marry a bald girl. Saint Anthony when his parents died sold all his possessions and went to the desert; he was attached to his riches and thanks to his generosity he became the father of the desert fathers. Saint Maximilian Kolbe changed places with another man who was going to be killed at Auschwitz; he gave his life for him, like Jesus did for us.

We don’t need to go to these extremes, but we have things in our lives that don’t belong to Jesus. We can ask Mary our Mother to help us to give them back to him.

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Parable of the first places

Jesus was having a meal with his apostles. We see often Jesus in the Gospels sitting at the table. It is important to spend time with others, and meals are great occasions to do so. People nowadays spend their time with their phones, just watching screens. These were moments when Jesus took advantage to pass on to them his message; he used these opportunities to teach them a lesson, in this instance, humility. Jesus was very observant, as holy people are, not self-centered, but completely aware of other people’s needs. It is important to have the right open attitude to look and to listen, to be able to help others when they need it. Self-centred people are hardly able to be of use to others because of their own selfishness.

Jesus noticed that people were choosing the best places at the table and related this parable. It was a practical lesson, where his apostles could see exactly what he was trying to teach them. It is a normal thing to try to pick out the best places when you watch a movie, attend a sport match or listen to a music concert. Beneath this attitude there is our constant pride, that we cannot get rid of. They say that pride dies twenty four hours after we die. The first sin of our first parents, Adam and Eve, was pride: they placed themselves before God. If you think you are humble, it means that you are proud, and the opposite. But better we don’t become complicated.

In the good old days when you read those beautiful books on Moral Theology, the spiritual authors used to describe the spiritual edifice, how our relationship with God could be drawn on a piece of paper. Each one of them had their own theories, where to place the three doors of faith, hope and charity; the windows of the four cardinal virtues, the rooms of the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit and so on. But all of them agreed about the foundations of the building: humility. Without this virtue, the whole relationship with God, our spiritual structure, sooner or later, will crumble and collapse.

We need to acknowledge that we are proud, that we normally place ourselves before God and others. It is not easy to acknowledge our nothingness. The best way is to compare ourselves with God: He is everything and we are nothing. Everything good we have comes from him. We only have our good desires and our sins. If we see God as a father, it is easier to see ourselves as little children.

A young man went to a holy man and asked him how to be humble: “Find somebody lower than yourself and do something for him.” He went and found a beggar and invited him for a meal. He felt good and went back to the holy man: “Am I humble now?” “No, find another man lower than yourself and do something for him again.” The young man got upset and asked: “How many times do I have to do it? 100 times?” “Till you don’t find anybody lower than yourself.” Somebody said that Jesus took the last place on earth and nobody can take it from him. He died on the wood of the cross, a place reserved for criminals. If we want to be closer to Jesus, we need to keep lowering ourselves. The lower we go the closer we become to him. I like very much a description of the Virgin Mary by Bishop Alvaro: “Convinced of her littleness, nothing distracts her from God.” If somebody could be proud is her. God bestowed on her as many virtues and privileges that a human being can hold. People with many talents normally sit on a pedestal, high up, above us, and they look down on us. Our Mother, on the contrary, is so accessible, so motherly, ready to give us a hand. Nothing separates her from God.

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The narrow gate

Today in the Gospel we see a fellow coming up to Jesus and asking an important question: “Lord, will only a few people be saved?” We are still asking this question nowadays. How many are going to be saved? Is anybody in hell? It is based in a truth of our faith: we all need salvation. Few years ago we had a debate about this topic when we had to change the words of the consecration during Mass, to better translate the original. We used to say that the blood of Christ was poured out for all and now we say for many. Some people weren’t happy with the change. We know that we all have the necessary graces to be saved. Saint Paul tells us that God “desires all men to be saved.” The truth of predestination is a difficult one.

Jesus didn’t answer directly. He just told us: “Strive to enter through the narrow gate.” He threw the problem back at us: the ball is in your court; it is up to us. The narrow gate is a good comparison, a graphic image. Jesus in Saint Matthew’s Gospel tells us a bit more about this gate: “The gate is wide and the way is easy, that leads to destruction, and those who enter by it are many. For the gate is narrow and the way is hard, that leads to life, and those who find it are few.” In this life there are only two roads that reach the other end: one goes down and it is wide and easy to follow; the other goes up, and it is narrow and difficult to find.

This tells us that heaven is won by force, getting up, struggling every day a bit, constantly beginning and beginning again. Do you think that plodding along, getting by, having an easy life is going to lead us to heaven? Today is a good day to change gears, to fire another cylinder, to take our faith more seriously. Jesus died on the cross for us. What are we doing for him? It is always difficult to know how much effort we need to put in without becoming obsessed, burned up or fanatical. It is not easy to find the balance. Saints are good at that. It is a matter of love. God is not going to ask something we cannot do. Pride can make us do silly things. It depends a bit on how we are. If we are a bit soft, we need to quicken our pace; if we are tough, we need to slow down. We are normally soft with ourselves and tough with others.

This narrow gate opens wide into a beautiful heavenly banquet. Jesus loves talking about this wedding feast, where he is the bridegroom and we are the bride. He himself tells us what we have to do to get through the gate: “Not every one who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ shall enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of my Father who is in heaven.” We are all invited, but only a few enter. Few doesn’t mean not too many, but it is a reminder that more should enter than actually do. It is the question of how many people are in hell. The saints answer that one is one too many. The good Lord talks to us about hell: “There will be wailing and grinding of teeth.” We need to talk about hell, even though people don’t want to hear, to warn them about its existence. When we fix our eyes in heaven, the road up is not too difficult. It is full of joy. The amazing reward, spurs us on. Look at how the martyrs endured their torments almost with a smiling face. They could see the finishing line.

Jesus ends the Gospel today with a paradox: “For behold, some are last who will be first, and some are first who will be last.” Imagine a race where the last wins; everyone would try to run backwards. Many people who are at the top of society will be last. And maybe the guy who is begging for money at the traffic lights will be ahead of us. We shouldn’t envy the famous: they have a more difficult road to travel. We should be happy with our own journey, the one God has prepared for us. It

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Set the earth on fire

Jesus says to us in today’s Gospel: “I have come to set the earth on fire, and how I wish it were already blazing.” In the Bible, fire is often used to describe God’s burning love for men. This divine love is what made the Word become man: “God so loved the world that he gave his only Son”. Jesus voluntarily gave up his life on the Cross: “Greater love has no man than this, that a man lays down his life for his friends”. We experience personally his love in the Eucharist, when we meet him in the bread of life. Saint Teresa of Jesus was travelling through Spain to set up a new convent. It was January, very cold, and it was raining. She was travelling in a cart, the roads were full of mud, and she was feeling sick. She complained to Jesus. He told her: “Teresa don’t worry about the cold; I am the real heat.”

Out of the three theological virtues, only charity remains in the other life. Faith is the door, hope helps us to go through, but love is what we find on the other side. Love remains for ever. Our love of God is a reflection of the love he has for us. When we die we are going to experience fully the fire of the love of God. Here on earth we are not ready to withstand it. This is why God doesn’t normally appears to us. We might disappear. We need a transformation, a renovation actualised through grace and our struggle. Benedict XVI says that the same fire of the love of God, consumes people in hell, purifies people in purgatory, and inflames people in heaven.

For a fire to last it has to be looked after, otherwise it is extinguished. It needs fuel to be added constantly. The same happens with any human love. If you take the other person for granted, if you don’t respect each other, the flame normally dies. For us to maintain our love of God, we need every day to burn a bit of our selfishness, a bit of our pride, of our vanity, of our sensuality. Our little fire has to grow, until it becomes a tremendous bush fire, that burns everything that is in its path. This is why the coming of Jesus is a cause of dissension. During his own life on earth, Christ was a source of contradictions. This fire of his love is infinite, all powerful. You cannot be indifferent in front of it. This fire has an important quality: it cannot be contained, it spreads everywhere. We can check the purity of our love by seeing how it inflames others. This is what the saints have done: set others ablaze.

We are constantly reminded that God is love, that his fire is everlastingly maintained. He has loved us first; we are here because of his love for us. The Lord wants us to respond, to have the fire of his love in our hearts, to be fully aflame. He loves each one of us with a personal love; we are all unique in his eyes. Because our soul is immortal, in a way, God cannot forget about us; he has never ceased to love us, to help us, to protect us. God loves us with an unconditional love, with no strings attached.

The Cure of Ars used to say that “to be holy, you need to be mad.” Saint Josemaria said of himself: “I am mad, from the love of God.” Jesus’ relatives called him mad when they didn’t understand him. On Pentecost day, people thought the apostles were drunk, after being filled with the Holy Spirit. When Saint Paul explained his conversion to king Agrippa, Festus called him mad. Saint Francis was called “the mad man of Assisi.” The holier you are, the more people will think you are ready to be locked up in a psychiatric hospital. We say that love is crazy, that out of love people do amazing things. We cannot forget that God is crazy for us. We should think about what helps us to love him more. If we feel cold in front of God, we can ask Mary our Mother, to kindle the embers of our

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The Assumption

Today we celebrate the feast day of the Assumption of our Mother to heaven. What can we say about what happened on that day? We haven’t got much information. Saint John witnessed it and didn’t tell us anything. John, you told us all about the life of Jesus, with plenty of details, but you didn’t want to tell us about our Lady leaving earth. She is our Mother too, and we would have liked to know more about her. But you preferred to be silent. We needed to know about how Jesus gave his life for us, but we didn’t need to know how our Mother flew up to heaven. It is better for our imagination; we can let it free. It took the Church a long time to declare the dogma, in 1950. Now we can let our imagination fly and accompany her up to heaven.

The apocryphal gospels, those books written by the early Christians to try to fill the gaps, say that the apostles came back to say good bye to our Mother. They say that they came back each in his own cloud, first Saint Peter and then Saint Paul. Maybe John didn’t tell us this because nobody would have believed him. Saint James was already dead and Saint Thomas, as always, arrived late, because he came back all the way from India. We understand why they wanted to be back. We too want to be there to say good bye to our mother.

There is a debate about what happened, if our Lady died or not, before she went up to heaven. She would have liked to follow her Son, and die with him on the cross. But Jesus didn’t want her to endure his horrible death. No son wants his mother to suffer. I don’t think Jesus wanted his mother to die either. God wanted her, body and soul in heaven, without her beautiful body experiencing corruption. That’s why she fell asleep. You could call it a sweet death. That’s how saints normally pass away, falling asleep, in a simple and beautiful manner. You die in the way you live. There is a feast in the East called the Dormition of our Lady, dating from the sixth century. According to tradition she fell asleep and they placed her in a tomb. When Saint Thomas arrived, he wanted to see her, and they found out that the tomb was empty. That is why we don’t have any relics from her body.

How did she fly to heaven? God has his ways of moving people. Most likely it was a transport of love. When love is very intense, it can do things that reason cannot understand. Love is crazy, endures all things, achieves all things. Love can travel through space and time. There is no better means of transport than going through the people we love. Love fired the engines of her soul and lifted her up all the way to heaven.

Tradition says that our Lady’s beauty, which was veiled here on earth so as not to blind human beings, not to drive them crazy, was revealed on her way to heaven, showing her in all her splendour, dazzling angels and saints in all its wonder. They never have seen anybody like that, not even in paradise. The book of Revelation tries to describe her, precisely with the words of Saint John: “A great sign appeared in heaven; a woman clothed with the sun, the moon beneath her feet, and a crown of twelve stars on her head.” I don’t think it is possible to find a better description of our Mother’s countenance. At last Saint John opened his soul and told us a bit about her Assumption.

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Waiting for the Lord

“Gird your loins and light your lamps”, Jesus is telling us today. Fasten your seat belt and start the engine, would be a modern way of saying the same. These are the two attitudes the Gospel is asking us to have. First, be ready for the journey, and then turn on the lights outside, to welcome the guest who is coming. The same expression from the parable of the foolish virgins: the bridegroom is coming, go out to meet him. Come out of yourself and welcome him. He has dropped us here and he is coming to pick us up. We are a rough diamond and he expects us to become a beautiful precious stone. This is the attitude we should have: waiting for the Lord.

In our society we don’t like waiting. We want things here and now. Drive throughs, 24/7, fast food, shopping online, drones dropping our goodies. We don’t like waiting for the Lord our whole life. We want to be in control, plan our future, foresee coming situations, have everything assured. We would like to know when the Lord is coming. And today in the Gospel Jesus is telling us that he “is coming at an hour we do not expect.” It is easy to be ready for one day or for a week; it is not easy to be ready every day. When we are young and when we are old; when we are healthy and when we are sick; when the sun is shining and when a storm is raging.

Waiting doesn’t mean a passive attitude. On the contrary, our waiting for the Lord demands a very active disposition, standing up, listening, looking towards the horizon. It means to examine our conscience to see if our luggage is ready, to discover what is missing or what we have forgotten. It means to fine tune our engine, to polish the rough edges, to get rid of excess baggage, to check if the lights are working, if we have put the rubbish out, if there is enough food for the journey. It is a daily disposition of being ready for him, to follow him, to be aware of his presence.

When our Lord comes to pick us up, we need to be standing, walking towards him, our eyes fixed on our destination, eternity, to see if we can see his face. We need to be ready to open the door, because the handle is in our side. He can knock on our door at any time and he must not find us sleeping, dozing in a slumber, or away shopping. We cannot just spend our time watching movies, listening to music, playing computer games, surfing the social media, following our sport’s team. We cannot give up, sit on the side of the road and take a siesta.

Two practical things for us to be ready: first to examine our conscience, to know where we have to struggle, what we have to do to improve every day. Love is always asking the person we love what we need to change. We should ask Our Lord what he wants us to do today, to look at God’s agenda. Second thing is to be patient. It takes a long time to grow, to mature, every day a little bit, baby steps, just one thing at the time. We cannot normally tackle big things. God is very patient with us. We don’t know when he is coming, but we still have time. He’ll come when we less expect it, like a thief in the night. But if we are prepared, we’ll see him coming, just as holy people can sense when they are going to die, because they are longing for him.

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